Bijou Be Well 2024

Bijou Be Well 2024

Zentangle created the Bijou Be Well event to celebrate their mascot, Bijou and to raise awareness for Mental Health Awareness Month. I decided to participate this year in the hopes of finding my inner Bijou and slowing down a little. Between building my catalog of music, keeping up with my students, and general life stuff, I stopped taking time for myself.

Ten days in to this event and I’ve discovered several things.

Making art is fun.

I mean. I knew that already. Taking a thing you love to do and making a business around it creates a big challenge. You start doing the thing you love because you have to not because you want to. This spring, I put my live classes on hiatus for this very reason. I loved working with my students, and I meet a lot of really cool people of all ages. Watching how they take an idea and spin it into something wonderful and unique to them truly inspires me.

But I also became burned out.

I made art because I had to create the next class. I stopped making art for fun. Bijou Be Well reminded me that this stuff is really fun and I look forward to each day’s video.

Keep it simple.

If you purchase a Bijou Be Well 2024 kit, you end up with a handful of pens and a bunch of 3Z tiles. The kit allows you to explore with a limited toolset – the elegance of limitations. If you spend time on the Socials and look at Zentangle art, you know there are a million different ways to create something. Many of us who have been doing this for awhile have accumulated a lot of supplies! The kit asks us to pare down what we use.

I did not buy a kit. I am one of those artists who has cabinets full of tiles, pens, and paints. In fact, I look forward to opportunities to break out some of the tools that I don’t use very often. So I failed in the limited toolset, but I am sticking to the 3Z tiles. As I select my tools for the day, I go with my first instinct and I don’t second guess it. If another idea pops into my head after I choose, I file it away for another time.

These tiles are smaller than the standard tile, but big enough to create a lovely monotangle – an exploration of one pattern. Each tile in Bijou Be Well starts with the same string border. Once my tools are selected, I don’t need to think. I just draw.

The world doesn’t end if you take time for yourself.

My plate is very full. It always is. It’s something that I am working on because I know it’s too much. I forget to come up for air.

Bijou Be Well reminds me to take a break and be creative for the sake of being creative. I look forward to each day’s email with the video link. In fact, I will be really sad when this event is over at the end of the month. Bijou is forcing me to rethink my days and how I can carve out little pockets to take little breaks and recharge. Ten days into this event, and the world has not stopped because I stopped for a little bit.

Here are the first ten days of the challenge. If you want to watch it with a little music that I wrote, check it out over on Instagram.